


Don't Leave

by heartswells



Series: Micro-Story Prompts [3]
Category: Cancer Crew, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: (Implied/Referenced) - Freeform, Bipolar Disorder, Eating Disorders, Insecurity, M/M, Mania, Prompt: Accursed, Relationship Issues, Substance Abuse, commitment issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 10:45:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16638449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartswells/pseuds/heartswells
Summary: His mind screamed leave, and he felt as he had always felt, the desperate, panicked need for freedom. He had thought he'd hushed it with the lullaby he called Ian, but insecurity had no silence.





	Don't Leave

  


He felt deranged, demoralized, snared somewhere between death and neurosis. His insomnia was like a needle, piercing his pupils and blinding him with bloodied tears. It was an agony that throbbed with every pulse of his heart, aching, pounding, screaming.

 

Ian cast a deformed shadow that appeared alive to Max's tired eyes, mocking him as it stared back at him from the wall.

 

The feeling that roiled in his stomach was incurable. He could do nothing to abate it. Neither feed it nor starve it. He could neither scrape it out of his body with his fingers nor could not quell it down with substance. Even with lungs shaking from self-induced euphoria, he could find no silence.

 

_Run._

 

Confusion became anger and anger became chaos in his body; it was a feeling like freezing, a feeling like fear as the body turns numb and threatens to becomes real.

 

His mind screamed _leave_ , and he felt as he always felt: intoxicated with the desperate, panicked need for freedom. He had thought he'd hushed it with the lullaby he called Ian, but insecurity had no silence.

 

He needed the control, to know that he could waltz out of his life unaffected when he chose to, to know that he could destroy everything and that neither him nor anyone else would give a damn—but that no longer was possible.

 

Ian cared.

 

 _He_ cared.

 

He was supposed to be rouge, the obscenity in everyone's night, the reckless joke that never had enough self-awareness to give a fuck. The walking shit-faced wreck with vomit on his shirt and alcohol in his blood. And lately he was not quite that. Lately he felt _invested_ , afraid he had something to lose.

 

_Leave._

 

His fingers twitched, itching for something. For some relief. For some destruction that would free him of care, that would free him of the consciousness of consequences.

 

Maybe he was in love. Lately, he felt numb, or maybe he felt like cold steel: a colorless wall, unyielding, callously uninterested and unresponsive to Ian's feelings. He felt like he couldn't experience love, like his empathy had frozen over and his care had turned from to plastic.

 

 _Leave_.

 

Ian tried to rollover and settled with his body splayed over Max's in a way that promised aches in the morning.

 

_Don't leave._

  


Don't leave. Don't leave. Don't leave.

 

You’ll regret it. Maybe that's what kept him there, the fear that he would be anguished by regret, the fear that he would feel an unbearable loss. He begged it was just another part of his cycles, the winter between the summers, the depression before the mania, in which love might resume. A curse that disconnected his heart from the blood it pumped.

 

He begged of himself, _don't leave._


End file.
